Sunday, July 15. 20079 things Firefox should steal from Safari
Apple recently launched Safari on Windows. This was done to make it easy for all developers to write applications for the iPhone. While announcing it, Steve Jobs indirectly said that he plans to take Firefoxs throne as the second most popular browser on the market. I don’t think Steve wants to oust Firefox, perhaps he didn’t want to outright declare war on Internet Explorer, but realistically if Safari succeeds it will be stealing I.E users, not Firefox ones. And if you look at the pasting that iTunes has given Windows Media Player, I’d say it’s quite possible that this will happen. I installed Safari recently to have a look, and whilst it’s nowhere near Firefox, it’s still ahead of Internet Explorer, so it could do very well on the Windows desktop, and may take another chunk off the IE market share. Once Apple bundle Safari, Quicktime and iTunes together as part of the “stuff you need for your iPod/iPhone”, they’ll immediately be able to claim that they’ve beaten the pants off Firefox for downloands, but it’s not a real victory. People who use Firefox will probably ignore or delete the little compass on their desktop. Hopefully Apple won’t piss us off like they do with Quicktime and leave a desktop shortcut and icon in the system tray for it. Sidenote: Does anyone ever launch Quicktime independently? Quicktime is a means to an end, no one starts it up and then thinks “Hmm, what apple trailer will I now go watch”, they click on the trailer and let Quicktime do its thing. Those shortcut icons are a joke. Anyways, here are the features that I liked in Safari, that Firefox doesn’t already have by default (i.e. not in plugins)
That’s all I’ve found so far, if anyone finds anything else interesting, please leave it in the comments. You never know, it might even get implemented. Additions from the commenters
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I disagree on nearly every point. Good try though. Your reasons to justify your opinions are pretty thin.
Yet again the worst and most useless comments come from the Anonymous.
Maybe you should try to show some maturity? You give FF a bad name.
I have to agree.
Input box stuff - don't care, this can sometimes destroy the look of a site, much better to allow the site developers to utilize css. The download box - oh come on! It does the job - nuff said. Yea the bug reporter is a cool feature, but only for beta or developers, how many typical users actually use that feature??
If you think that a blue border can destroy the look of a site , you must visit some seriously shitty sites.
The download box "does the job", but then so did internet explorer for a few years. It's not about doing the job, it's about being the best you can be. The bug reporter is cool, yes. And whenever an application crashes, that's what users should be seeing, plain and simple. Maybe only .5% of people use the thing, why not give those .5% the best user experience going? I'm not saying Firefox is inferior, I'm (quite literally) saying here are things it should rob to get even better.
The bug report described is not to report crashing Safari bugs. Rather, it is to report to Apple that a particular web page is not rendered correctly by Safari, or if a particular web page is not behaving correctly in Safari.
You've obviously never used Safari... The bug report dialog let's you submit Safari crashes, pages not loading correctly, incorrect Safari behavior or appearance, or just about anything else. Please don't talk anymore.
"I just think Safaris one is nicer" is the only argument you give for the download box, when in fact, they're both pretty similar both in functionality and in layout. (Of course they will differ in the look as one uses OS X widgets and the other uses its own skinning abilities.)
The download box "does the job" in both cases. Safari's doesn't look to me like it's offering something in particular that Firefox's doesn't have.
>Your reasons to justify your opinions are pretty thin.
Pot, meet kettle.
When I first moved from Windows to my MacBook Pro, I stayed away from Safari, and stuck with Firefox. Then more and more I started appreciating Safari, and now I love it (and started using the windows version at the office). Firefox still rules for development, but for da to ay usage, Safari is definitely the way forwards.
Oh, I totally agree about the font rendering too - it's a bit weird at first, but when you get used to it the 'Windows way' just looks plain ugly.
I think the best thing Safari has going for it is the tabs. Now, Firefox has'em too, but Safari's are better connected to the keyboard short cuts.
Scenario: You have three tabs: 1, New York Times, 2 Child Porn, 3 The Doritos Homepage. Your in your cubicle dreaming of Doritos when your Boss comes up. Think Fast! [Type Comand+1] BAM! No more incriminating evidince, you're reading fine news from — shit! Child Porn. Either way, it's nice if you do a lot of typing and you're quick with your keyboard commands. Less useful if you're a hunt+peck, mouse-focused type.
You can do that too with Firefox. On Linux, it is [Alt+Num], while on Windows is [Ctrl+num]. I'm not sure why they put different keybindings to different operating systems, but there's a way.
Some extensions may "steal" those keybindings, though (StumbleUpon steal the Alt+Num on Windows and DialFox (or something like that) steals the Alt+Num on Linux).
Honestly, I don't want to see those things implemented on Firefox, but available as add-ins. This way, say, "highlight current field" wouldn't break every CSS around.
Font rendering may be a problem, though. I mean, Microsoft and Apple hold most of the patents for techniques on doing that and the Mozilla guys can't use them without paying something back (even if they don't make a dime when someone installs firefox).
Right, but they do make a dime whenever someone uses that handy google search in the top corner there. FF may be free, but that doesn't mean it isn't profitable.
And how does the blue outline "break the css?" Been using Safari on a mac for years now, and I've never met a page that could handle the blue outline... not sure what you meant by this. Back to the article, I agree with all your points (though I could care less about the bug reports - I'm part of the 95.5% of users you never bother with them.) I also submit that there is a lot that Safari could rob from firefox - most notably would be extensions.
Well, you can define the border color of textfields in the CSS, including the :hover property (or something like that), which will change the CSS when the input has the focus. I'm not sure, but I guess you could put the some color in the background or in the border itself that would make the outline looks weird or simply disappear (or make the page look different than the author expected -- which is the same problem we face today with IE and Firefox).
Uh... Safari has a wealth of extensions. The developer community isn't quite as extensive as Firefox's, but it will get there. Check out www.pimpmysafari.com.
I tried Safari on Windows when it was first released, and I though the GUI was hideous. Thus I dumped it and went back to Firefox.
While most all of these Safari features are improvements over Firefox, I think they are so minuscule that they wouldn't be worth coding up. As far as the glowing text boxes, I think they look gaudy. Good idea, I supposed, but I have rarely ever lost my cursor, and so this is really a non-issue. As far as font rendering, I prefer the windows fonts. I even change it when I am running Ubuntu so that the fonts display as they did back in Vista. As far as rendering speeds, there are sources (http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/06/wired_news_benc.html) which would beg to differ. That shows that Safari is slower than both IE and FF. In short, nothing on that list is a "killer feature" that Firefox doesn't have in its plugin library or would be worth stealing. Its mostly trivial stuff.
Piravte browsing is one of the better features in Safari. It is a simple way to ensure privacy. No cookies and no history. No cleaning up after, no deciding on a site by site basis if cookies are ok. I use this anytime I am on a clients computer. No accidentially leaving the remember password checked. It is also good to use whenever you are visiting a site you don't trust or that you don't want people to find in your history.
private browsing in safari is half baked. i don't sit around using other people's computers, who does really. the point is that you don't necessarily want others to see what you have been doing if they use your computer, wife, kids, at work, whatever. with firefox, i configure it once, i have it empty everything on exit except passwords and cookies I've made exceptions to that i want to keep, e.g. newspaper sites i'm logged into, amazon.com, etc. once setup, you never have to mess with firefox again, and everytime you start it up, it's clean except for a few cookies that you have allowed to be persistent. with safari, you have to constantly go in and clear out your cookies manually, and then relogin to amazon.com and your other sites that require the cookies, or selectively delete cookies, but that's just as big a pain. firefox actually has it right. it's not called private browsing, but you configure it ONCE and you have REAL private browsing. Or you disable cookies in safari completely and some sites dont' work right. Safari should copy Firefox's private browsing features and then my one REAL annoyance with Safari would be gone.
Most of the points are preferences that the majority would disagree on. Firefox's philosophy is not to pack the basic browser with features (as standard user never use them anyway). So if you want advanced controls, that's what Firefox has extensions for.
#1 Can be done with a user stylesheet #2 Where is there an issue? #3 doesn't really look nicer, somehow boring, if you want another look there are extensions, even ones so you will never see this dialog #4 Maybe depending on some Firefox seetings, maybe an issue #5 Sorry, but the last time I saw the Firefox bugreporter was over a year ago (simply never crashed although in use hours every day). So I can't judge on this one #6 again: extensions, there's one for every flavor #7 extensions: I don't even need to drag the tab. A simple mouse gesture is enough. (but there are many more ways) #8 agree that IE is broken, Firefox could improve, but the last thing that I heard about this is, it's a windows issue. #9 again extension. It seems the author simply hasn't really tried to use Firefox. 5 points can be changed by extensions, two are non existent, one is a windows issue, and one is disputeable.
Anyway who says this is pointless is half the problem. If you don't think user experience is important to your browser, than maybe you don't you are, in a way, retarded.
"7. Detachable tabs"
If you customize your toolbar in Firefox (View menu) to have a New Window button, you can drag tabs up to that button to create a new window with just that tab's page. At least I can... not sure if it's standard or one of my extensions.
The idea is to not have to modify the browser via extensions or what-not. This behavior should exist in the browser as a standard feature (in which it does not).
When dragging objects out of a browser, be it image, content, page, tab, etc; it should match the intended user behavior-- The person wishes to drag that content out of the current window. It is the job of software developers, whether it be OSS/free/proprietary to develop software that A. Does the task efficiently, and/or B. Does the task intuitively. If you develop software that has a broad consumer base, such as Firefox, developing BOTH methods is the target. Keyboard shortcuts are most efficient for advanced users, but are frowned upon for novices as visual cues work best with them. As of right now Firefox has an absolutely horrible (as in, completely unintuitive) behavior for dragging tabs off the browser or any content that is in the window out of it. My personal feeling for content dragging Links: Dragging links towards where the hidden tab bar should make it slide into view to allow them to create a new tab. Dragging them out of the browser should either pop up a new window. NOTE: Links that point to non-html related content should be downloaded to desktop. Images: Same tab bar behavior, but also dragging them creates a translucent image that can be dropped onto the desktop to save it, or to the tab bar to open it in a tab. Mixed content (selected portion of webpage, eg image and caption): Dragging the content to the desktop will create a html document with the matching HTML content (related DOM tree elements, CSS, and other related information).
> The idea is to not have to modify the
> browser via extensions or what-not. This > behavior should exist in the browser as > a standard feature (in which it does > not). Clearly you haven't read Firefox's mission statement. They're out to provide a functional lightweight browser. They do not want to cram in features that some people want and others don't. The give you the basic browser and let you choose what features you want to add on.
Yeah, but at the same time, you want to provide the best experience possible out of the box, cause lets face it, browser extensions will only ever be used by computer savvy people. The other 70% who are still on Internet Explorer aren't going to install plugins.
Nothing I've suggested here should be behind a plugin bar font rendering. Highlight a form field when it's active shouldn't be a plug in. A decent bug submission system shouldn't be a plugin. They should be the default behaviour.
The only point I really agree with is the point about detachable tabs. I've lost track of the times it would have been handy to keep pages organised in separate windows for example
Apple should teach a writing course so fanboys can actually spew readable garbage. And this got dugg?
Microsoft fanboys should stop wasting their time reading blog articles like this one.
I haven't checked out Safari yet, and don't know if I will since Firefox is a beast, but i do like the highlighting of the text field, resizeable text areas and detachable tabs. Nice article though.
The thing that bothers me most about firefox is the actual browsing. Occasionally some pages won't load after a few refreshes, and when they do load i get the crappy void-of-html pages. I get this on firefox on all computers. Buttt i'm pretty sure this is what you meant in number 4. I suppose the browsing speed of a browser is what you should consider the most, but I'm gonna stick with all of firefox's other wonderful features.
"Because let's face it, Latex is a joke as far as markup languages go."
It is one of the more powerful and expressive typesetting languages, heavily used in the scientific community for publications. The fact that you erroneously refer to it as "Latex" instead of its proper "LaTeX" goes to show how ill-fitted you are to refer to it with any tone of authority. Regardless, HTML/CSS and LaTeX serve very different purposes, and it is very unlikely anyone would benefit merging the two.
"Jerry, if you think that me skipping the retarded capitalisation that LaTeX promotes means I am ill-equipped to comment on it, then you're wrong."
Really the issue I had with your mini-blurb about LaTeX comes down to this one statement: "Because let's face it, Latex is a joke as far as markup languages go." I'm not sure what type of markup humour appeals to you, but a Turing-complete markup language that redefined typography in the scientific community isn't really funny to me at all. To compare it to the HTML/CSS model which strongly promotely separation of content and presentation seems off to me. I suppose I was insulted on behalf of Donald Knuth. Admittedly, I jumped the gun and didn't bother to gather any background information on you, the author of this piece. That might have shifted the tone (which was bastardly condescending) -- apologies for that. It's okay if you don't subscribe to the LaTeX-loving population, but I think your readers should understand that LaTeX has always been intended for print media within scientific and academic communities, and never really for the Internet. LaTeX is good at what it does, so why bother changing it? Also, it's not so much capitalisation as technically the "T" is a Tau and "X" is a Chi... 
Latex is just plain difficult to use in my experience. I use it. It annoys the hell out of me that LaTeX is the only document creation software that produces beautiful documents. It annoys me because no one can use it bar scientists and folk working in publication houses.
I take your point about Knuths intentions being academic only, but it's damn annoying that my sister can't prepare a C.V with the fonts looking wonderful unless she is willing to learn a fairly tricky markup language to do so. It also irritates me that I can't easily define my own cls styles in latex. In comparison the ease of use of CSS is hugely refreshing. Thanks for coming back Jerry, I appreciate your comment. Des
Wonder if you're aware of the LyX document processor. If not, lyx.org. It provides a word processor-like means of producing TeX-typeset output. If needed, raw LaTeX can be embedded in ERT (evil red text).
Re your observations on Safari- most of the 'niceties' you mention are typical of OS X generally. As you said, little things add up to make an enjoyable UI.
You have obviously missed the point of why TeX and LaTeX look good, the fonts are not brilliant, it's the layout of those fonts that make it look good, with proper kerning and spacing that users of all word processors and even a lot of desktop publishing packages cannot dream of
The fonts in Windows are actually better fonts in terms of raw appearance but the layout of these fonts in most (if not all) windows programs is amateurish at best The difference between TeX and HTML is that HTML is a collection of hints on how a page should look (no absolutes just suggestions) and XHTML tries to say what the meaning of sections are? Which is why different browsers on different machine show the same pages differently TeX says what the meaning is AND how to lay out the pages - which is why a TeX document always looks the same ...
Latex is hard to use, unless you use a dedicated Latex Editor.
There are two (same author(: Kile (On Linux/Mac/Unix only) Texmaker (Linux/Mac/Unix/Windows). a little less elaborate than Latex.
and btw there is a firefox extension to resize the text-boxes area it's called Resizeable Form Fields by Justin Watt
Nice article. Ignore the haters ... as someone who has bounced back and forth between Firefox and Safari for ages, these are all good points. Maybe no single one is a deal breaker, but they add up.
For me the find functionality, the tab behaviour, the resizable text entry boxes and private browsing have real value. Safari doesn't overburden the user with a lot of visible features--in fact the GUI is pretty simplistic--but it's nice not having to track down a plug-in for every little behaviour whose default can be improved upon.
Safari places all bookmarked pages in the disambiguation list as you type. This is HIGHLY desireable, as it permits you to type a few characters and select the match you want from your bookmarks. I really don't care to ever once click through folders of bookmarks. Firefox only throws URLs in there that are in the history.
Note that Firefox does a better job than Safari at handling these disambiguations -- it requires you to hit the down arrow to start selecting from those hits. Safari's method is worse in that the "most likely" match fills the URL bar and requires you to hit BACKSPACE simply to indicate you don't care to use it before you press enter. That's just presumptuous! Best take: use Safari's model for what should be in the disambiguation lists, but keep Firefox's UI for selecting from there.
So, you completely ignore the amazing RSS functions in Safari which Firefox is absolutely useless on?
Maybe you should replace a "nicer looking download box" with "Better RSS management"
I agree with your points generally, although there are more.
RSS is awesome in Safari, you might say there is a plug-in on Firefox, but Firefox has native RSS handling, and it is lazy bullshit fuckface nonsense. Bookmarks manager and its behavior is much much better in Safari too. Private browsing is great, especially if you are using someone else's computer and don't want to leave a trace or kill all the owners history as in "clear private data" in Firefox. Webkit and the JavaScriptCore Project used by Safari are both better than Gecko and the Javascript interpreter on Firefox.
Good list. A couple more things:
- Safari's full-window bookmark/history browser is very well done. Very easy to search for and delete bookmarks and history. - In Safari, bookmarked URLs always appear in the URL auto-complete list, regardless of whether or not the URL is in also the history. Firefox's auto-complete list only contains URLs from its 9-day history, which is a pain. - Keyboard shortcuts! Safari includes a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts, including shortcuts for enabling/disabling pop-up blocking, showing/hiding various toolbars, and opening preferences. Firefox, not so much. It's nice to be able to disable pop-up blocking on the fly, for specific we sites. - I don't much care for Firefox's tab overflow mode. A simple pop-up menu works better.
Amusing. Once you start to do serious web app development, you will completely disagree with your decision. At the end of the day, the greatest thing a browser can do is come as close as possible to the W3C standards that are approved and being flexible enough to support the stupid things that Microsoft does that's outside the W3C standard so that your pages don't look shitty. Plainly stated, Safari makes websites break in many cases. Safari sucks.
However, Firefox could stand to add features where these are due, but I don't like anymore bloat than I need. I want speed, speed, speed, and the ability to hit a site without it being broke. Firefox does a good job of that, as does IE, but Firefox does it better for me in my opinion. I also don't like sucking up to the whole M$ thing (since I use Ubuntu) and so I definitely use Firefox.
I'll agree with you that web sites should look the same in all browsers. That's why we have standards. But take a look at the standards, and then take a look at how each browser complies to them. The order is something like this:
Opera>Safari>Firefox>Large Void>Internet Explorer But then let's look at market share: Internet Explorer>Large Void>Firefox>Safari>Opera While it is true that Safari breaks some sites (though not as prevalent as you imply), it is not because it doesn't comply to standards. It is because Internet Explorer doesn't comply to standards and has such a large market share. Some developers code to work only in Internet Explorer, and somehow see the standards-compliant browsers as the problem. Wrong. You can't expect other browsers to emulate problems with Internet Explorer just because it sucks. Safari doesn't and neither does Firefox. Really, I haven't noticed very many sites that break in Safari that don't in Firefox. Oh and the whole "I use Firefox because I don't like bloat argument." Ha. Good one. Have you ever used Firefox on a mac? Even on a PC it is more bloated than Safari.
1. Definitely agree.
2. Personally, I think Safari looks horrendous in terms of font rendering, but it's a matter of preference. 3. Definitely don't care. They are both just about identical. 4. Several reports/measurements/studies have already shown that Safari's rendering speed is a myth, and in some cases significantly slower. So I call BS on this one. 5. Safari's bug report is better, but how often does the "normal" user ever report a bug anyways? 6. Slightly better, but the yellow highlighting is just as effective as the faded out look 7. I am sorry, but detachable tabs is just about the most useless "feature" on this list. Absolutely pointless 8. Sorry, but this one is just incorrect. I just tested it out on Windows, and Safari can't do drag and drop of an image. Firefox works perfectly. This is more BS. 9. Again, a useless "features". I can't possibly tell you the last time I needed a text field to be resized. Sure, you might use it once a year, but it is definitely not a killer feature worth stealing. You got 2 right, congratulations.
Once more cool Safari feature:
- When opening flash content (e.g. YouTube) in a new tab in the background, the flash content doesn't start playing until the tab becomes visible.
Are you sane enough to say that? Opera is the fastest browser by all standards. It is also much more value packed than FF and Safari. It's really sad that people dont even know its name. Once you use it and know its advanced features, no one would ever use FF, Safari or IE.
Hi Shreyas,
Enough people have talked about opera here to convince me to give it a shot. The real question is "Will I bother writing a 'things firefox should steal from opera' list?" Is it really worth the fucking bother?
I was one of the biggest ff fans ever
I used opera before ( a lot before ff existed) but back then it wasn't good enough for my needs. so I remembered it was something good but haven't really paid much attention to it, and was using ff. a week ago I've decided I had enough from ff , don't get me wrong, its probably the best browser ever. but it was too heavy, I'm using an old AMD 2800XP desktop with 256 of ram and p4 700hz laptop, ff worked but it was really slow (even tho I tried using it as less as possible on the laptop), and crashed a lot (I think it has something to do with flash plug-in for linux and not really the ff fault) so having enough I decided to check opera again. and its amazing. its defiantly the fastest and lightest browser I've seen , I can even say it runs fast on laptop. getting the speed dial interface on a new tab is awesome and it never crashed for the week I've been using it (ff crashed 4 times a day). I haven't yet used or understood all its features , but I can defiantly say ff has more and better ones then opera. so I don't think ff needs to steal anything from opera but the other way around. the mozilla foundation is stuck for a long time with troubles it can't or doesn't try to solve. the first thing is ff being a giant memory hog. and some unsolved security issues and interface problems (especially in the linux versions) the problem of ff its not it features but its basic core. and opera has an excellent core but lacks the feature support. I has to think that adding features is easier then changing the entire core of the program. so I would love to see opera with add-ins , better search , better spell check . I mean if I had firebug equivalent for opera I would have no need for ff
The highlight one could be useful, I guess, but the only one on the list that I really really agree with is the detachable tabs. Opera does it, but opera is slow to render. if there is an extension for detachable tabs I want it.
Why not make file bug reports instead? Or at least read about what Firefox 3 will have, like an improved bug reporting tool, and use of a newer graphics engine called Cairo.
Also, at "SomeJerk" in #21, care to share why your opinions should mean a damn thing when you aren't backing them up with anything? Just because you are too lazy to install a few add-ons doesn't mean the rest of us aren't.
Detachable tabs is a great idea I have no idea why they don't already have this. Also resizable textboxes should also be possible (there's a firefox extension to do this though).
Firefox has been bloated for a long time - by plugins.
Want to do development work - you need plugins. Want to really use RSS - you need plugins. Want some other wiz-bang efficient feature - you need plugins. Firefox is a great browser, but if the solution to everything is a plugin it will die a slow death. Damn, FF needs to at least use native form controls on each platform. Those 1999-era submit buttons have to go. Then again I think that's Des' point. Learn from the competition and improve. Unless you prefer the not-built-here-means-it-sucks method of painful reinvention.
There's a greasemonkey script called textarea_drag_resize that provides the functionality that you want for item #9.
See: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5073 and http://www.greasespot.net/
1. Firefox does this on Mac OS. It's an OS form issue. FF tries (sorta) to look like a native app and thus the form controls act like those on the host OS. Bitch to MS, this is certainly a great feature but the user applications are not where to implement it.
2. Again, an OS thing. Personally I think Safari on Windows looks odd because it doesn't match everything else. Making Firefox do things differently too would be the wrong idea. 3. To me the Safari and Firefox download dialogs look near identical. What exactly is Safari doing so much better? 4. Valid point, but it depends on the page. FF does some things better, Safari others. That said, speed is always worth improving upon. 5. Back when FF was younger, this was worth something, but with the exception of pages that depend on ActiveX I have not seen a page render incorrectly in FF since 1.5 or so. This particular type of bug report is thus unnecessary for most. 6. Yea, the Apple way is definitely better, no question here. 7. Same 8. I think the FF way is perfectly clear as well. 9. Yea, I can agree with this too.
About draggable tabs: I was just thinking this morning if that existed as a firefox plug-in. Just learned that I can drag a picture to my desktop.
1. I'm sure you could use Grease Monkey extension to add this effect.
2. no clue and I'm not booting an Apple to find out. 3. What more do you need for it? It has status, open, cancel, retry, etc... 4. Don't know about Safari, but FF could use improvement here IMO. 5. eh? not why I chose a browser. 6. The Find dialog could likely be extended with an add-on. 7. Tab Mix Plus, and I can do more than that also! 8. Ascetically pleasing, yes. Doable with FF, likely if really wanted it depending on how much it relies on the OS. Personally I don't want some HTML enabled functionality on my desktop. 9. Neat idea, again likely could be added by add-on to FF. Personally I prefer to cut & paste it from UltraEdit where I have more editing control. FF bonuses: 1. It's not Apple, 2nd only to M$ in the 800lb gorilla category. 2. It's more secure. 3. It's extendable & customizable. 4. See #1 again.
One thing I certainly hope they don't adopt from Safari is the silly grey on grey colors. Hopeless for those with vision problems and totally not changeable, the status line being almost unreadable. It's ok for "mum's n dad's" but poor for those who work the web professionally.
Both browsers could use a bucket of features from Opera (eg interface being based on CSS and configurable etc). Though many shy away from Opera due to it's enormous advanced feature list, once you get to know it the others do seemed a touch simple (FF with extensions excluded). There is a reason Opera is avail on more platforms that the other top 3 combined.
The one thing Safari should steal from every other browser in the world is the ability to consistantly render images with the correct color mode.
Why after so many versions of Safari does it still have this same problem?
Re privacy browsing. It works great, but if you watch a quick time movie, the movie is kept in the quick time cache. So watch out as that is NOT private and could lead to problems.
1. You're right, there is a problem with the way XUL renders text forms, and it should be fixed to be native. Thankfully, Firefox 3 will correct this issue, at least on OSX, but not on Linux yet.
2. If you use OSX, then Apple anti-aliasing should be used. If you use Windows, ClearType should be used. If you use Linux, then the native anti-aliasing should be used instead. Again, it's a clear matter of Firefox-is-not-native-enough. 3. Well, I think Firefox's is much more useful. 4. Have you tried Gran Paradiso lately? 5. You're right, Firefox's bug reporter should and will be improved. 6. There should be an extension for this; it looks very, very useful. 7. No thanks. One window cluttering my desktop is more than enough. Why was tabbed browsing created for anyway? 8. Firefox 3 on Linux has this. Not on Windows, though. Must be the version of Cairo. 9. You're absolutely right about this too. That what bookmarklets are for. So, to sum it up: Firefox needs to be more native, and you need to wait for Firefox 3. Nuff said.
Great article. The find, tab/window, and speed are more than enough reason for me to stick with Safari
Hey, I'll translate this post to portuguese, ok? May I? I'll put your name on credits
 It's my blog http://tradutorium.wordpress.com Coming soon the "9 coisas que o Firefox deveria pegar do Safari".
wow. this sucked. i was hoping for some insight but it looks like with was simply a case of blind digging.
1. Okay, That's kind of cool. You can probably get an extension to do this in firefox
2. No. NO. NO! I used to do tech support for Apple. People HATE the font antialiasing. It's terrible and should not be repeated anywhere. Ever. 3. Um. No. - The download menu is actually the one thing in Safari that irritated me more than anything when I worked exclusively on Safari. I kind of like not have to right click for every freaking option. 4. Okay, I'll give you this one. This was not the way it used to be. Safari used to be vastly slower, but they've upgraded and Firefox has bulked up. I'd still take the customization of firefox over 1 or 2 seconds faster loading times. Oh wait, I don't have too. Google Web Accelerator and Fasterfox make it better. 5. Seriously irrelavent to 99% of users. 6. Frankly it doesn't make a difference to me one way or the other 7. Yeah, cool. Plugin. 8. Makes zero difference to me, so long as it's not the IE system 9. Okay, Kinda cool. Probably someone can write a plugin for this.
1. Quicktime
I guess they leave the icon there so one can start it (you never know what those n00bs are up to these days) and because you can use Quicktime to record stuff as well. Maybe not the most impressive program to record stuff with, but at least possible. Hence the icon. Think you need Pro to record though. 2. Safari on windows For you non-mac users out there. iTunes and Safari on Windows will awkward and odd. They don't really fit in. It is because they really are OS X apps, which works differently. The fact that the Safari window refuses to work like a windows program in many ways bugs me. A lot. That being said, those apps work a hell of a lot better in OS X, where they belong and are integrated. It is just as bad (actually even worse) to get non OS X apps in OS X. Such as generic open source stuff (or rather portable software) or running Windows apps in OS X. 3. FF on Windows (because IE sucks, and IE 7 didn't make it suck less, just have more crap in the way), Safari on OS X. I guess if Apple grows their share, they will get a larger browser following:)
I'm a Safari (Mac) user, and I think this is exactly how you should respond to Safari appearing on Windows. It's a chance to further erode the "browser that shipped with the OS" thing (I have tried Firefox on the Mac, it's a superb product, I just prefer Safari).
Firefox should play to its strengths, nimble and agile. Take what's good, ignore what's bad.
I'm coming at this from the OS X side but here's my #1 feature that I wish Firefox would take from Safari (and most other Mac applications as well):
PLEASE, use the network settings currently defined in System Preferences rather than needing me to configure them manually in Firefox whenever I am connecting via a proxy server. As a mobile user this is very important to me and drives me nuts. However, this does seem to be a problem with many cross-platform applications so it's not only Firefox's problem. With respect to the "use a plug-in" statements, this just drives me nuts. Much of this seems to be an attitude that all Firefox has to do is render a web page as fast and as correctly as possible. However, I would suggest that a browsers role is to help you find and organise information that is stored on the web and Firefox isn't that great at doing this "out of the box". Everyone seems to tolerate the "Google Search" field, which isn't a necessary feature if all you need is a web page rendered, so I don't see why we'd be against other features that help you find and organise data. As unpopular as this may be I much more prefer the tack that Flock and Camino have taken, i.e. taking the excellent rendering engine of Firefox and wrapping a fully featured browser around it. However, I will note that some of the features of Safari 3 has meant that it has become my default browser again over Camino, particularly the new Find feature and the tab management system.
Many things you mentioned can be customized by using extensions, for example "resizable text areas". Check out my blog [1] to read more about popular plugins.
[1] http://elsbrock.com/news_id8
I learned a thing or two, very nice post dude. It'll be great if you can write " What Apple should steal from Firefox".
YES!
I agree completely, you know your stuff and its about time Firefox was knocked off its pedistal because the basic UI needs serious work (much more important than Microformat crap or adding a quicksilver ripoff to it)
Give me mouse gestures in Safari and I will switch.
Not because I'm a silly fan-boy. Because Safari just works better on my mac. Sometimes (rather often) even opening a new letter in Gmail gets FF to show the Beachball of Death for a while. Except for the downloads box being nicer, it was a good post and I think all the angry FF-fanboys should find themselves a woman
I agree with most of these, being an internet-customizer-using-firefox like myself. in particular:
-Find dialog. in the newest firefox, they removed a few things. before, you type and it starts finding text, the bar pops up on the bottom (with automatic options for find next, find previos, highlight all, close) but disappeared after a few seconds of non-use. now, the bar pops up for the same limited time, but without the extra search options (annoying!) if i didn't know open-apple+G, i'd never get to find the next instance of my search. small gripe, but useful! -privacy browsing=porn browser=the only reason i change to safari -media opening in new tabs starts playing even if tab is opened in the background. when i'm running through the digg front page and i open 5 tabs in the background and one of them starts making noise... easier to just pause the media when it opens! you know your shit though, send this off to firefox with all of our comments and lets get our porn browser! uhh, plus other things...
I like your ideas, maybe do one for what Firefox should steal from Flock?
2 brilliant Safari options.
1. Merge all windows - puts all windows into tabs in one window. 2. Reopen all windows from last session! (great for when Safari 3 beta crashes on you when you click on a PDF link - lmao!)
This is in my opinion a great post.
Some of my pet peeves about firefox: 1. icons are ugly as hell - IE icons / Safari icons are very nice. I know you can always customize, create your theme etc. I don't want to do that - why can't I have a basic good theme and still retain the ability to customize ? 2. The whole extensions thing - is a geek thing. Given that, some extensions are not available, different versions, incompatibility known only after download and install etc. are simply gruesome. End users are lost. 3. Anybody seen the "Inspect element" in the right click menu ? I always wanted to know the style of the item I am looking at - try doing it in f'fox - you would know. I see that firefox is going the way of the 1990s linux desktop with no clear direction and thousands of useful extensions nevertheless available to geeks with no life. Only now things seem to be coming together with Gnome / KDE and with ubuntu as the most popular distribution. Windows/IE is successful because it gives a reasonable out of the box experience - not infinite tweakability. Accept it and work towards it - when u reach this point, you will have the advantage of the beast being infinitely tweakable (and still working) as well.
The only problem I see with your idea that this will take away from IE users is that anyone who doesn't think the blue "e" is the internet probably already has firefox. I think after it's been out this long, we're probably reached (or are starting to reach) a saturation point. No one is going to switch away from IE who hasn't. Only those of us using Firefox may switch to and fro from from FF to Opera to Safari and back.
But, hopefully, I'm wrong.
Yeah, that's a fair point. I do genuinely think that Apple are in a position to leverage users away from I.E in the exact same way they did with iTunes.
Basically if Safari is installed, and becomes the default browser, automatically copying the bookmarks, then what's not to like. It looks better, it works better, it's Apple so it must be good, right? Once people get away from this "IE by default" notion, then it will be a true browser war, fought not on lazy defaults, but on what people genuinely think is the best user experience. The diggtards posting here saying "Des that's all available as a plugin, therefore your post is bullshit" just don't get it. Take the linux desktop, since 97 or so it's been capable of providing a good user experience, but to achieve it required tweaks, plugins and auto-configuration scripts. Only since Fedora and Ubuntu came along has it seemed likely that things will be great by default. Yes, Firefox is the best web browser, but it is not beyond improvement.
Warning: An opera centric response follows. If you dislike alternatives look away.
#1 - IMO should be left to the web developer. Browsers should not try to impose a look and feel onto a website unless the end users has specifically requested it to. #2 - Haven't looked into this so you can have this one by deafult. I think it should come back to standards though. #3 - IMO Opera has a great download dialog. It is informative and allows you to stop/pause/resume/restart downloads easily (even across browser sessions). It also gives nice notifications when a download completes. #4 - If noticeably faster isn't enough... http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html #5 - Not sure what to think about this. It would be nice to not have bugs. But I guess you can have half a point for that. #6 - Opera gives you choices. You can open an old school find dialog or have a little notification style area that finds text as you type your query and highlights the current results. There is also a search dialog in the top view tool bar. #7 - Opera has this covered. #8 - Opera has this covered minus the overlays. #9 - Cool idea. Bonus points for this. Additional #1 - RSS - Opera has this built in. Uses standard notifications that can be seen even if the browser is minimised. Additional #2 - Privacy Browsing - Opera can delete cookies and history automatically on exit. Automatic cookie deletion can be set per domain. Maybe an expansion on this idea would be good. Additional #3 - Media in active tab - Great idea. Needs to be easily turned off by users that don't like the idea though. Opera #1 - Zoom. Rather than scaling text. Opera allows you to 'zoom' the entire page contents (incl. images and styles). 20%-1000% anyone? Opera #2 - RSS Alert. Opera shows a notification in the address bar if the current site has a link to an RSS or ATOM feed on it. Opera #3 - Turn elements on/off. Opera allows you to easily turn on/off: javascript, gif animation (great for crap myspace pages), sounds, plugins (eg. flash), css, images (can be switched to 'cached images only'), etc.... Opera #4 - Drag links to toolbars. Dragging links onto toolbars creates shortcuts. Opera #5 - Speed dial. Nice... http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screenshots/speeddial.jpg Opera #6 - Widgets. Do you want to get vista to run 'gadgets'? Have you used 'desklets' and think there cool. How about cross platform versions that you can take with you? Enter Widgets. http://widgets.opera.com/ Opera #7 - Cascade/tile tabs. Why should a tab fill the window that contains it? Opera allows you to change the layout of multiple tabs in a single window by cascading them or tiling them. Handy for comparing sites. Opera #8 - Refresh all. Got 30 tabs open and you want them all to refresh? ctrl+F5. See also #13 Opera #9 - Trash can. Whoops. Didn't want to close that tab. ctrl+z = undo. You can also view a list of item you have closed. Opera #10 - Preview tab rollover. Opera allows you to mouse over a tab and see a miniture version of the page on that tab. Opera #11 - Print preview in same tab. Operas print preview shows the preview in the tab not in a new window. Opera #12 - Good context menus. There are some nice extra options that I don't have time to list here. Opera #13 - Reload every X. Easily set a page to reload every X seconds. Useful for development. Opera #14 - Downloads. It is easy to say files of type 'x' should be automatically downloaded to this folder or opened or run by this program. Opera #15 - And much much more (image formats, tab duplication,search from address bar with prefix, memory usage, cross-OS consistency, etc )..... Try it for yourself before you judge it. I welcome any criticism from those that have tried Opera. I spend a lot of time using ie6 and firefox for work purposes and have used many other browsers during testing. I PERSONALLY prefer Opera. I am more than happy if Opera doesn't float your boat and you decide not to use it. While it remains an under used but excelent browser it will remain one of the most secure.
Warning: An opera centric response follows. If you dislike alternatives look away.
#1 - IMO should be left to the web developer. Browsers should not try to impose a look and feel onto a website unless the end users has specifically requested it to. #2 - Haven't looked into this so you can have this one by deafult. I think it should come back to standards though. #3 - IMO Opera has a great download dialog. It is informative and allows you to stop/pause/resume/restart downloads easily (even across browser sessions). It also gives nice notifications when a download completes. #4 - If noticeably faster isn't enough... http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html #5 - Not sure what to think about this. It would be nice to not have bugs. But I guess you can have half a point for that. #6 - Opera gives you choices. You can open an old school find dialog or have a little notification style area that finds text as you type your query and highlights the current results. There is also a search dialog in the top view tool bar. #7 - Opera has this covered. #8 - Opera has this covered minus the overlays. #9 - Cool idea. Bonus points for this. Additional #1 - RSS - Opera has this built in. Uses standard notifications that can be seen even if the browser is minimised. Additional #2 - Privacy Browsing - Opera can delete cookies and history automatically on exit. Automatic cookie deletion can be set per domain. Maybe an expansion on this idea would be good. Additional #3 - Media in active tab - Great idea. Needs to be easily turned off by users that don't like the idea though. Opera #1 - Zoom. Rather than scaling text. Opera allows you to 'zoom' the entire page contents (incl. images and styles). 20%-1000% anyone? Opera #2 - RSS Alert. Opera shows a notification in the address bar if the current site has a link to an RSS or ATOM feed on it. Opera #3 - Turn elements on/off. Opera allows you to easily turn on/off: javascript, gif animation (great for crap myspace pages), sounds, plugins (eg. flash), css, images (can be switched to 'cached images only'), etc.... Opera #4 - Drag links to toolbars. Dragging links onto toolbars creates shortcuts. Opera #5 - Speed dial. Nice... http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screenshots/speeddial.jpg Opera #6 - Widgets. Do you want to get vista to run 'gadgets'? Have you used 'desklets' and think there cool. How about cross platform versions that you can take with you? Enter Widgets. http://widgets.opera.com/ Opera #7 - Cascade/tile tabs. Why should a tab fill the window that contains it? Opera allows you to change the layout of multiple tabs in a single window by cascading them or tiling them. Handy for comparing sites. Opera #8 - Refresh all. Got 30 tabs open and you want them all to refresh? ctrl+F5. See also #13 Opera #9 - Trash can. Whoops. Didn't want to close that tab. ctrl+z = undo. You can also view a list of item you have closed. Opera #10 - Preview tab rollover. Opera allows you to mouse over a tab and see a miniture version of the page on that tab. Opera #11 - Print preview in same tab. Operas print preview shows the preview in the tab not in a new window. Opera #12 - Good context menus. There are some nice extra options that I don't have time to list here. Opera #13 - Reload every X. Easily set a page to reload every X seconds. Useful for development. Opera #14 - Downloads. It is easy to say files of type 'x' should be automatically downloaded to this folder or opened or run by this program. Opera #15 - And much much more (image formats, tab duplication,search from address bar with prefix, memory usage, cross-OS consistency, etc )..... Try it for yourself before you judge it. I welcome any criticism from those that have tried Opera. I spend a lot of time using ie6 and firefox for work purposes and have used many other browsers during testing. I PERSONALLY prefer Opera. I am more than happy if Opera doesn't float your boat and you decide not to use it. While it remains an under used but excelent browser it will remain one of the most secure.
Ed, that's a really informative comment deserving of a blog post of its own. Please write it up and post it somewhere, as you'll get the appreciation and feedback that you deserve for it.
Opera #13 - Reload every X. Easily set a page to reload every X seconds. Useful for development.
Feckin' sweet feature. Really useful if you need to refresh a web page from a monitoring system say. Something I was surprised firefox didn't have, as I noticed the other week.
One thing I like about IE is the fact that creating a new window (Ctrl-N) gives a new window with the history of th previous window. What stops Safar / Firefox from providing an option for that ? (I think there is a Duplicate window in Konqueror - not too sure).
For FF, Duplicate Tab in New Window-
CTRL+SHIFT+N Or the long way- CTRL+N for new window, then drag the tab over.
Jesus people, they are suggestions. I didn't realize people were so touchy about FF. It's a great browser but it's not perfect. I think most of these would be a good addition. Try, just try to look at them with an open mind instead of immediately going into defense mode.
I personally thank you for the time in offering this comparison. To the person who did the Opera comparison, appreciation is sent out to you as well.
Good call Ed, exactly what I think every time there is one of these 'firefox doesn't do this' posts.
Interesting article. You are of course correct on most of your points. For the inevitable retards that rip your post apart, ignore them. They're too stupid to appreciate the finishing touches on Apple's software anyway. If people listened to the "but there is a plugin" crowd then the core browser would never see any improvements. Often integrating features just works better than clunky plugins, and also means you can upgrade away without worrying about features you depend on getting broken. Granted Firefox is good at manageing plugin upgrades, but can still rely on the author updating their plugins every now and again. On the flipside, Safari needs plugins and a site that actively encourages plugin developement - Firefox has got it perfect. While Safari has some of the Apple spit and polish, and is a little faster, it still doesnt come close to Firefox in looks and overall functionality.
I don't know if this was stated before this is in response to point #1.
It's the job of the person who wrote the CSS for the HTML document to specify a focus style on text-area/input field elements. In Firefox, you can add this to your userContent.css and have it work globally (textarea:focus, select:focus, input:focus, button:focus { border: 2px solid #000; background: #ff0;}). It isn't as pretty as the blue glow but it certainly is possible right now.
Thanks for that Nick, I'll do that now.
I totally disagree with you about how every website should specify its own focus style. It seems redundant. Surely this is the sort of thing that should be performed by default with an option for web designers to override if they want to. Firefoxs
I agree that an option for a default focus style should be present but I still believe it is the job of web developers to provide a style.
I don't use Safari so I don't know if this is possible but can you remove the blue glow on focus? If not, do you ever find it ruins a graphics-heavy design? What happens when there are focus styles present in the CSS? Does Safari overwrite them? Thanks for the response.
"As far as font rendering, I prefer the windows fonts. I even change it when I am running Ubuntu so that the fonts display as they did back in Vista."
Anyone who thinks that should have all their opinions removed from the internet. Windows font rendering is garbage, it doesn't respect the characters or metrics in the slightest. Get some glasses
A word of advice for everyone here who seems to think that any Firefox problem can be solved by writing an extension: there are serious performance penalties to this approach. One of the most common (and to my mind, legitimate) complaints people have about FF is the ridiculous amount of memory it eats up. Admittedly, you can improve this by fiddling around in about:config panel, but that's an ugly UI hack that shouldn't be necessary in the first place. In the mean time every extension you install increases the amount of RAM FF uses, often by a significant amount. I recently noticed that my FF performance seemed to be getting worse and worse. I checked the task manager and was shocked to discover that it was also using a ridiculous amount of RAM; I don’t remember the exact number, but it was almost 300MB. For a freakin’ web browser!? I was running Photoshop CS3 at the same time and I remember being amused that it used half as much memory, even with several large documents open. I was running about 11 FF extensions, all of them pretty common: Del.icio.us, web developer, firebug, venkman, tamper data and a few others. I disabled 6 that I didn’t use that often and FF dropped back to a (comparatively) svelte 120MB and performance increased dramatically. That’s still too big, btw: Safari uses about 45MB on my system.
I don’t know whether this problem is a result of poor programming by extension developers or is a structural problem inherent in FF itself. In any case, it doesn’t matter: FF extensions don’t undergo the rigorous testing and review that say, the mozilla code base has, and I don’t think anyone should have to sacrifice performance or stability just to get useful features. I like FF, I really do. On Windows and Linux boxes, I don’t use anything else. And I love some of its extensions: Firebug is incredibly useful for CSS debugging and Venkman is indispensable if you are serious about writing good javascript. But “just write an extension” is not a valid response to any criticism of the browser. In fact it can make things worse by compromising performance and wasting system resources.
Good post. I agree with all of your points, it's always so strange to see people who feel as though they're being personally attacked when you offer up potential improvements for a piece of software they use. It's also funny how many people are combating your observations with "user stylesheets" and the like - as if it were such a practical solution for any user. Oh well, good read nonetheless.
I'd like to see auto-completing of Bookmarks, like Safari does, in Moz*.
Like most postings stating how safari is better than ff the point you have missed about ff is that almost all those "problems" you point out are custumizable with add-ons. My download status bar is different. I've seen one that highlights the cursor box. Fonts are custamizable in the about:config screen. Like i said everything else can be accomplished with a plug-in. Except the dragging a tab for a new window. That i do want. And dragging a pic, which is a windows problem not FF.
Well my point is that home users won't use extensions cause they're not into computers in the same way as you or I. So asking someone to head on over and customise their browser is a no go, cause they won't bother.
Right, and those same end-users are not going to download a replacement for IE.
Well written & maintained extensions are not hard to install or use nor are the so obscure that only a geek can find & use them. The true beauty of extensions is you are not being forced to do it M$ or Apples way. It's just like OSX, great idea but your forced to use Apple's idea of a good machine. Free it from the Apple hardware junk pile & it would sell because those of us who know how would build our own PC with the better OS. Like it or not people, using a machine properly is "Geek" and does require some skills. At least until we get to the speech & AI level of "Computer, get me some porn & do it safely".
Well to be fair Firefox is gaining serious ground on IE by anyones metrics. It's spreading quickly, so these people will download a replacement.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure Apple won't give them a choice once it's ready. I reckon safari will either come bundled automatically, or at least as a pre-selected option with the next iTunes upgrade.
"Detachable tabs You can drag a tab out of the bar and spawn a new instance of Safari containing only that page. You wouldn’t think it, but this is quite useful."
Yes, but in FireFox, that is already replaced with a shortcut to a website in that tab. I think it'd be nice if there was a super-advanced feature dialog that said "What would you like to happen if you drag a tab onto the desktop?" And other features such as those. Resizable forms are nice, and this has probably already been said, but resizable forms can mess up the view of the webpage. There should be a post that contains all the things that FireFox has that safari needs. Hey, I'm not saying I don't like Safari... If it can beat FireFox and IE's memory leaks (I want under 30,000k for a browser instance... so like 1,000k for 20 tabs and then 10,000k for everything else), I'd be happy to use that browser. Browser wars are retarded, everyone uses the browser they like that fits their needs... No one really needs to critique the browsers.
has no one here heard of opera?
many things on All browsers came out first on opera. tabs, mouse gestures, and soon enough i bet you other browsers will have speed dial. which opera already has.
Oh my god that's what i've been wanting to say all along. Not only are a lot of these features copied from opera, but the integrated e-mail tool, the rss reader the ability to download torrents directly are just incredible and just work! You can also change everything and anything you like... All it lacks is firebug ;(
But then again most people don't want to do all that stuff and for them Safari is simply beautiful and easy to use.
How can you actually like Apples font rendering? In the Beta version in Windows Safari looks crap. It's like taking glasses off someone and getting them to read.
"How can you actually like Apples font rendering?"
Because it renders fonts the way the designer intended them to be rendered (and the way they'll be rendered when printed). See: www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
Windows IE is just plain embarrassing. I cannot believe that some dorks acutually still use that pile of sh*t.
Good stuff man. I love the safari redering and text box stuff. Good article. Love it!
The moon landings were faked, they were shot on a sound stage in Holywood
Thanks, as a Safari on Mac, FF on Win user, I agree.
I was a little surpised a the vehemence of the disagreements. Partly, the web is not a civil place. But I did read an interesting article on BSD vs Linux that claimed the BSD paradigm was a coherent release and Linux was much more about a place to do apt-get / rpm to customize to your desire. while I like ( and WAY overuse ) firefox extensions, due to increasing complexity and decreasing expectation I can get a new stack to work, I am increasingly drawn to the "make it work, easily" even if I have to give up some bleading edge stuff.
Yes, I do launch quicktime independently sometimes, since it now has the ability to play most of the avi files I download. It's like using VLC (which I use most of the time).
If Safari just supported extensions it would be a hell of a lot better than firefox
Nice article.
I always like the way Safari looks. Infact i am using the iFox metal theme for firefox. I agree to Des Traynor that firefox does need to "steal" the safari look. But Safari does terribly lag behind firefox in terms of performance. The presence of Adblock extension always allows firefox load pages faster. Safari must seriously start think about developing some addons or atleast allow some add ons to work on the Windows version of safari. Almost all versions of Safari add ons work on Mac only! So i am happy with a safari skinned firefox.  And i see many people blindly criticising the blog owner and starting flame wars. Thats not a good habit. We can always go for creative criticism but we should never insult some one. Its pointless to engage in a flame war. So people, if you have a comment, just say it nicely and move on, after all its just a blog entry & you are not paying anyone to read this article.
Nice article, and your points are good. Chances are the Firefox developers who are an intelligent bunch agree. Most people commenting here are fucking morons who are easily ignored.
Another thing I love about safari. With long combo boxes you can type the whole string and it will select what you've typed, not just the first letter. Also its page-loading-status system is lovely. With the whole URL bar acting as progress information. It beats the other two browsers 20px progress bar. It sucks for figuring out where links point though, unless you want to show the otherwise useless status bar. But I've found you can drag links and and the drag overlay becomes the text of the destination. A workaround for form over function, but it's handy to know.
Max, if you type the letters fast enough, Firefox will match what ever you type (be it a word or a single letter).
Hey interesting write-up. I definitely agree with the copying of images to desktop issue, and the text rendering issue. Actually when I initially started using my Mac (I realize you were talking about Safari on Win) I had a hard time with the text rendering... something about the way Apple uses PDF tech for rendering, which I imagine has been ported to Safari for Windows (there's actually an article about that somewhere online).
However, just as an aside that I wanted to write to - after reading your write-up on LaTeX, I went to Apple's Pages to compare your issues with MS Word and LaTeX, and you know what? All those issues (or rather, most of them... I couldn't test Adobe's Garamond font, not avail or didn't want to find it) actually turn out like LaTeX handles them, not like Word does. You font geeks are amazing sometimes, I swear. I ALWAYS thought there was something wrong with the kearning between letters in Word but could never apply a term to the problem until you pointed it out. Thanks man! Now to file a bug report with MS (hahaha!)
Are you sure the text-area-highlighting pictures aren't switched with respect to how they're described in the text?
I agree about the shortcut icons being a joke, but you forgot that they (Quicktime, ate least) also include an insult: installing an icon to run in the system tray to suck up cycles and alert me for spurious reasons.
Great article. I agree that polishing details makes a browsing experience better. I'm a full-time FF user (Safari is sleek and fast, but lack of extensions is a no-go for me!).
Interesting to see this in context of FF3b4. They've fixed a number of the issues you had: 1. Fixed, at least on Mac. Since they're using native widgets, I don't know if they'll fix this in Windows. 2. Not fixed (?). Probably still using the Windows AA engine. I'd actually chalk this up to being a Windows bug, since every program on Windows uses the same not-very-pretty text engine. 3. Fixed. Much improved downloads box. Has search and some new commands available. One of the earlier betas had icons to open a file, but that doesn't seem to be there anymore (?). 4. Tough call. Too subjective for me to comment. FF3 is much faster, in any case. 5. Fixed (?). Report a broken webpage is pretty much the same. I thought this was in FF2 though... 6. Not fixed. +1 agree (safari's find is really nice) 7. Not fixed. +1 agree 8. Fixed. Images drag to desktop in OSX (pretty sure Windows works too). 9. Not fixed. +1 agree I'm split on whether FF should be enhancing some of the native OS features that are lacking in areas (ie: XP lacks focus rings on textboxes, Windows' rendering is subpar IMHO). There's something to be said for "fitting in" with the L&F of the platform. Microsoft really should be providing a native focus ring implementation and allowing users to tweak the font rendering for heavier AA if they want. Now, my two features safari needs to copy from FF: 1. Use FF's selection model. The hybrid range/block model safari uses is really bizarre (IMHO!). 2. Copy FF's awesomebar. Once you start using it, you can't go back. 'nuff said. Other than that, I'll say that FF3 and Safari 3.1 blow the rest of the browsers out of the water in terms of rendering/JS speed, memory usage and features.
If I'm uploading a file to a site such as Photobucket, I usually have a explorer window open to the file I want. With Firefox, IE, and even Opera, I have to go through the tedious labour of browsing to the file again with the browse dialog, but with Safari, I can just drag-and-drop the file to the uploader! Yay!
About the re-sizeable textarea...there is an addon that does that for firefox now.
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This website is the online diary of me, Des Traynor, a User Experience Researcher in Dublin, Ireland. I work with Contrast. I usually write on 5 topics: I update about 3-4 times per month. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss this good stuff. If this is your first time here, check out the archives.My official homepage provides more information about who I am, and what I research. You can contact me at destraynor [at] gmail [dot] com Quicksearch |
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Apple recently launched Safari on Windows. This was done to make it easy for all developers to write applications for the iPhone. While announcing it, Steve Jobs indirectly said that he plans to take Firefoxs throne as the second most popular browser on
Tracked: Jul 16, 03:53